Quality of Hire: So Much More Than a Metric

Maintaining a competitive advantage in this marketplace can be challenging. Despite the booming HR tech industry and advances in HR management, bad hires, low performers and toxic employees somehow make their way onto the payroll and wreak havoc on company resources. That’s where Quality of Hire comes in, but defining the term and having the means to measure it don’t come easy...

The Elusive Quality of Hire

Quality of Hire is one of those buzzwords that gets tossed around in the HR space, but how it is determined and defined is as elusive as the perfect job candidate. Have you ever tried to search the internet for the definition of Quality of Hire? Few have had the guile to define it outright, most likely because developments and advancements in the metrics it encompasses have made it’s true function somewhat pliable in terms of what organizations hope to get out of it. According to the CEB, Quality of Hire is defined as:

“noun: a new hire’s current and likely future effectiveness at completing his or her individual tasks, and contributing to others’ performance and using others’ contributions to improve his or her own performance.”

Quality of Hire is how organizations measure the value a new employee will bring not just to their own performance, but to the overall goals and performance of the company. If that’s true, then why are some of the more commonly used metrics used to determine Quality of Hire time-to-fill and cost-per-hire? Those types of metrics may help reveal efficiencies in the recruiting process, but they do very little in determining what and how hiring decisions impact the ability for organizations to meet business goals.

Quality of Hire measures new employee value on performance and goals of a company and individual.

Furthermore, experts contend that more commonly used metrics to measure Quality of Hire are one-sided, only reflecting on the recruiting process and not taking into account how the decisions and management styles of hiring managers impact the data. Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify Talent, explains:

“You can have an amazing hire and a horrible manager. That great hire will be poached by another organization and that’s not a reflection on the recruiter that brought that person in.”

To be able to predict and track what a new employee brings to the table for the entireorganization, it takes a lot more insight than metrics like cost-of-hire and time-to-fill as well as properly assessing those metrics for both pre- and post-hire. Determining Quality of Hire is integral to predicting a new employee’s effect on the long-term success of an organization and for Quality of Hire to provide the greatest insight, several metrics have to be measured, analyzed and tracked over time, but the current disposition of Quality of Hire carried out by most organizations today is inaccurate, inconsistent and merely bits and pieces of what should be an extensive and inclusive process for the metric.

Quality of Hire: A Metric and a Philosophy

Quality of Hire is a metric fundamental to every moving arm of HR. When done right, you can measure the value an employee brings to their position and to the company’s overall goals, how efficient the recruiting process is, where problems in hiring decisions are coming from and what changes need to be made in respect to recruitment, hiring, culture, engagement, and performance management. But how do organizations even know where to start when the definition and the metrics of Quality of Hire are so misunderstood and disconnected?

What Quality of Hire really means both as a metric and a philosophy:

According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends of 2016, 45% of Talent Leaders cited Quality of Hire as the most valuable metric in talent recruitment. That’s interesting considering that of those same respondents only 33% strongly feel they can measure Quality of Hire effectively and only 5% feel as though their methods are “best in class.”

Without all of the right variables, Quality of Hire is merely an inconsistent and therefore, inaccurate measurement of value that does nothing for the overall effectiveness of an organization’s workforce. With all the right variables, however, Quality of Hire becomes an organization’s identity and a philosophy to create standards and expectations from. A seamless, all-encompassing way to determine the true value of Quality of Hire and how it pertains to the overall performance of an organization’s workforce is the only way to accurately assess an organization’s recruiting, hiring and performance management processes.

It’s Time for a Change

Mastering Quality of Hire isn’t something that happens overnight and it certainly can’t be done without the proper resources, expertise and, most importantly, the right outlook. Organizations should be realistic about what they hope to gain from the resources they have at their disposal and ask themselves if how they measure Quality of Hire is really giving them the kind of insights it takes to improve not just the recruitment process, but the entire organization.

Ask how ClearCompany’s Talent Management software can help you optimize Quality of Hire. Check out a free demo today!

As the head of a department in the midst of a sustained period of rapid growth, Sara has spent hundreds of hours interviewing, hiring, onboarding and assessing employees and candidates. She is passionate about sharing the best practices she has learned from both successes and failures in talent acquisition and management.